Category: Site News

Announcing The Voice Of Cheese!

Now then: about that poll. At this time of writing, out of 257 voters, 39% (a nominal 99 votes) declared they not only play music, but have recorded some of it as well.

The plan, as obvious as it must have probably been, is to showcase a KUR reader’s recording, say once per week. I would host your track, have the commenting masses do their thing, and we’d hopefully find some gems in the process here and there. To be clear: your tune needn’t be Zappa-esque or avant-garde or something like that. Anything goes — from hillbilly country-music through Klezmer to high-brow electronic music.

So here’s how I got it worked out practically:

  1. Those interested: feel free to drop me an email!
  2. Subject line: “KUR Reader Music Submission” (this is important as otherwise your submission shall go the way of the dodo)
  3. Body of email contains name of track, your name and/or band-name and preferably some more information
  4. Please do not attach any mp3’s in your email
  5. I will contact each contributor for details on how to obtain the track
  6. Your track will be hosted at KUR should you not dispose of your own online hosting facility
  7. Contributions will be posted chronologically — that is to say: in accordance with the email queue
  8. Each track should be in .mp3 format, and should not exceed a 6Mb size limit (this includes the 25 self-declared Eric Claptons)
  9. By entering, you confirm that the track’s copyright is yours.

Care to join the Voice Of Cheese? You know the drill! :)

Kill Ugly Radio World Tour: Let’s Roll!

Right, well I’ve pretty much finished doing the cover of Our Latest Pet Project. Just to give you an idea of the mess this has been causing on my desktop, here are some pictures:

kur_wt_cover1.jpg

kur_wt_cover2.jpg

kur_wt_cover3.jpg

The Plastified Cover…:

kur_wt_cover4.jpg

More on Flickr. What’s more, Dr Sharleena has completed her contribution as well, so this book is ready to hit the road — starting with Tommi. I’ll be putting up a promotional banner shortly but until then, remember: if you want to be part of this, the place to sign up is right over here. Happy doodling! :)

Rock The Vote!

Could I ask everyone who’s been voting in the discography section to, um, cast their vote again? See, I figured a choice from one to five stars was not enough so I went and changed it to 10 and in doing so, um, I basically had to reset the database. Heh Heh! Heh. Oh, and don’t forget to delete any relevant browser cookies set by the pages while you’re at it.

* runs for the hills screaming *

Discography Reloaded

Hurrah! The discography pages are now running on WordPress as is just about everything else on this site! I bet you’re just as excited as i am! What it means:

  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.
  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.
  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.
  • All reviews have been preserved in all their eloquent glory.
  • Search is once again available.
  • A new star rating system which is so cool, you have to try it!
  • Old ratings have been, um, deleted.
  • No more getting rid of oodles of comment spam in the morning.

I still need to figure out how to display most recent reviews to the right here on Hot Poop — but none of you guys actually ever noticed that feature anyway, now did you?

A Note On “Fake” Comments

In response to this comment from someone pretending to be Joe Travers, the real Joe Travers writes:

Only a true asshole zappa fan would go up on a site like this & say that it was me. Do you guys really think I would post comments like that? Do you really think GZ would ever allow something like that from the ZFT? Yeah, I’d really have some job security saying stuff like that. You guys really continue to prove yourselves.

There have been other occasions where a commenter reacted under the guise of Gail, or Dweezil, or Joe (or me for that matter). I tend to leave such comments untouched in cases where it’s obvious that the comment is a non-malicious spoof. When that line gets crossed however, it becomes a matter of identity-theft, and the rules change.
And so, since:

  1. nobody wants their name attached to something they did not write, and do not agree with or feel insulted by,
  2. it is not my ambition to get into trouble with the ZFT

… I will as of now be deleting any malicious comments from people that do not respect these guidelines. You know I like a good laugh as much as the next guy, but let’s keep it civilized and respectful. Okay?

We’re Back :)

It’s fun, you know, updating website software. I spent the entire afternoon upgrading the forums in order to prevent mass sign-ups from (mostly) moronic Russians trying to make a buck ruble by mass-posting links to pictures of Asian men with huge penises photoshopped male genitals. Head on over to the upgraded forums if you please, and let me know if anything looks/acts weird…

A Zappa-centric blog in The New York Times

On the Zappa-centric blog Kill Ugly Radio, one fan wrote of the May 19 show in Stockholm: “This was my first chance to experience the music of FZ live in concert. And what a concert. Sitting there on the fourth row from the stage, I found myself with BIG smile on my face, laughing out loud at times.”

Wow! :-) – And some more: a review on the NY show.
(You have to register to see this article – 10 seconds only)

Weirdo Swag!

In the “Blatant Self Promotion” Department, have we got news for you! If you liked the weirdo ecards Dr Sharl and I provide over at weirdocards.com, you’ll be glad to know that some of those designs are now available on T-shirts, hoodies, tank tops, thongs, mugs, mousepads, posters and other what-have-you’s. Just head on over to the online store and have a look around. Unfortunately, anything to do with Zappa got refused by CafePress — however! There is Cheese! Cows! Hairdo’s! Punks! Sumo Wrestlers! Exclamation marks!

Forums Back(ed) Up!

Phew. I managed to restore the forum to a back-up from May 19 (CET). At first glance, all previously deleted threads are back. Depending on the exact time at which the actual back-up took place, any posts made after it (perhaps 1 or 2), will have gone AWOL — but that’s peanuts compared to the amount of threads that had gone lost. So forum-dwellers: have a look at the boards and if any of the posts you made on May 19 are gone (most probably they’re not), well, you’ll have to post them again.

Shit Happens, The Forum Edition

Last Friday night, one motherf@#!ing idiot thought it would be a good idea to spam the KUR forums. This asshat took the time to register and went on to post over 170 messages promoting some rancid pornsite. By the time I’d got up and had my first cup of coffee, the damage was done.

I then tried to delete these entries by going straight to the database, as there were just too many to be deleting them via the forum’s admin. In the process, I appear to have also deleted entire threads. Yes: never do anything that drastic on one cup of coffee, and yes: always back up first. Lessons learned.

Anyway, all is not lost, or so I hope. I’ve contacted my webhost with a request to revert the forum’s database to a backed up version from around Friday morning. Until I get a (hopefully positive) response from them, the forum will remain in “Maintenance Mode”. Stay tuned…

KUR: Your Top 100 Belgian Weblog

Hey whaddayaknow: according to Alexa, KUR caps the 74th spot in the Top 100 of Belgian weblogs! You know what that means, right? It means there’s about a 100 weblogs in this country. :)
Looking at Alexa’s info page for KUR though, this was a rather surprising statistic:

Where do people go on killuglyradio.com?
wiki.killuglyradio.com – 68%
killuglyradio.com – 29%

Wow!